If Neanderthals “diverged” from “modern humans” 800,000 years ago but many of us have Neanderthal genes (yeah, 23andMe stuff, for sure), what chance is there that much of the contention is based on the fact that we don’t really know enough to be sure of very many things?
Tag: Neanderthals
Did the Neanderthals have a cult going 130,000 years ago?
About the golden eagle. Okay, “cult” isn’t a designation of praise but it’s way better than how the Neanderthals were thought of in the past. Anyway, we are told that the birds used to snatch Neanderthal children. Maybe it was revenge.?
Did Neanderthals prize golden eagle claws for their symbolic value?
Researchers think that the claws may have had symbolic value. Another way of putting it is, anyone can gather feathers.
New film: What if a Neanderthal were alive today?
A critic finds that the show has unexpected depth.
Smithsonian belatedly asks, What do we really know about Neanderthals?
What do we know? Well, we know what the science establishment has told us, that’s what. Previously, the science establishment spent a lot of time looking for the Darwinians’ subhumans. At all times, thin on the ground, it would seem. So they drafted the Neanderthals because, well, they were there. Now it seems, they have discharged them.
Researchers: Neanderthals shared genes with woolly mammoths
Rob Sheldon: This article suggests that Neanderthals and Wooly Mammoths had the same unique LEPR gene (unknown to humans and elephants).
Researchers: Warm weather made cannibals of Neanderthals
The researchers see it as a desperate measure. They don’t (and, of course, shouldn’t) rule out ritual cannibalism, which could also be a response to stress (= if we eat this person, we will absorb his ability to spot big game). Slowly the picture comes in and we are still looking for that subhuman Darwin promised us.
The Neanderthals are undergoing a renaissance
The artwork accompanying a recent essay makes them look positively human. Just where Ooga! Ooga! has got himself to now, we are not sure.
Latest from Daytime Soaps 120,000 BC season: Inbreeding may have caused Neanderthal extinction
Well, now that our writer mentions it, we don’t really have thousands of Neanderthals for a big sociological study. It’s interesting, of course, and the main thing is, we can probably get more information as we continue to dig.
“Humans still marry Neanderthals?” This is what some people call science
So may we now blame Neanderthals for our own bad choices? Wow.
How Neanderthals got the role of The Subhumans
The “shock value” of officially scientific concepts of the subhuman was a harbinger of things to come.
The “dumb Neanderthal” myth dies hard
Prediction: Neanderthals will suddenly become just like us if a different set of putative “less than human” bones turns up. So long as there is no other “not quite human” in easy view, it really doesn’t matter what Neanderthals actually did. They’ll still have to be cast that way to appear in the approved drama of human evolution.
Cultural evolution theories “challenged” by multiple dwelling cave
This kind of find is treated as problematic because it means that the missing link is still missing. Nobody is the subhuman. That’s not good news for a Darwinian approach to human evolution, in which someone must be the subhuman.
Darwinian evolution and underestimating the Neanderthals
A zoologist asks why we need to see Neanderthal man as dumb: Talking about a recent paper discussing differences in skull shape, he notes, In the Pleistocene world of rapidly changing ecological scenarios luck had everything to do with success or failure. It was all about being in the right place at the right time, […]
Did Neanderthals create the first Spanish cave paintings?
If they did, that’ll be even less reason to think of them as some kind of “missing link”: What if, long before Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, the Neanderthals were humanity’s first artists? At any rate, this is the hypothesis raised by new dating of Spanish rock paintings published in February 2018 in the journal […]